URL parser

A URL parser is a procedure that turns input text, and sometimes a base URL, into a structured URL record or a failure. The record separates components such as scheme, host, path, query string and fragment identifier. URL serialization converts that structured result back into text; it is a different operation from retrieving the identified resource.^[ref]

For a worked example, parsing https://EXAMPLE.org:443/a and serializing the result yields https://example.org/a. The host is normalized and the default port omitted. Successful parsing did not test whether the server exists, whether access is permitted or what content would be returned.

Failure also differs from a recoverable validation issue. The WHATWG algorithms can flag some nonconforming input while still producing a record, so an implementation should specify whether it reports validation diagnostics, a usable result or both. A regular expression recognizing one tidy address format is not automatically an implementation of the full parser.

A practical reproducibility check compares parsed fields and the serialized output under a stated parsing model. The WHATWG model and generic RFC syntax serve related purposes but should not be silently treated as identical grammars.